The struggle continues.
That’s his version of course; Bari Weiss’s is bound to be very different.
I still think Bari Weiss running CBS is like Trump running the US. Amateur Hour type of thing.
Category: Notes and Comment Blog
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Queer pagan liminal healing practices
Colin Wright gave us this gem:
This person just got a PhD in human sexuality for a thesis about “How Queer Witches Heal Without Western Psychology” and why “magic” should be a “public health priority.”
From the abstract:
“What can queer pagan liminal healing practices teach therapists and other practitioners? Investigating the dichotomies of clinical versus spiritual and history versus present, as well as the inherent liminality between queer memory and queer futurity, aid us in understanding the many subaltern patterns of queer witch healing that are created in the absence of support from mental health fields of practice.”
Liminal AND subaltern – that is deeply impressive.
The dissertation was submitted to the – wait for it – California Institute of Integral Studies. Does that sound prestigiousy or what?
CIIS Academics
CIIS cultivates therapists, thought leaders, creatives, and activists through integral education — an embodied and whole-person approach to learning, teaching, and knowing.
Oh I see, that kind of “academics”. Thought leaders and creatives and activists are all…how shall I put this…self-described. Anyone can call herself a thought leader or creative or activist, without any board of qualification asking to see her credentials. In short there are no criteria, no barriers, no requirements. Therapists are a bit more…liminal?…being as how some kinds of therapists do have to have credentials, but I think people are still free to declare themselves therapists without having to know anything.
CIIS blends intellectual rigor with embodied practice, offering flexible formats and deeply relational learning environments. Whether online or in person, in community or in solitude, our students engage in transformative education that bridges theory and lived experience.
That sounds nice, but it also sounds like hokum. Furthermore, it tells us absolutely nothing. It’s just “we are good” but in more words.
It has a Department of Women’s Spirituality.
Our Women’s Spirituality programs at CIIS are rooted in deep exploration as a means to create extraordinary change.
The Department of Women’s Spirituality envisions a new kind of scholarship, one that puts our interconnectedness at the center of all that we know and do. We offer a transdisciplinary, multicultural, and socially engaged approach to the study of gender and spirituality.
It could talk that kind of toe-curling guff and still be a genuine college of some sort…but…that kind of guff is bound to repel any genuine academics, so I have to wonder what the faculty is like.
There’s one very odd thing about the photo on this page though. It shows a bunch of people on chairs in a big room that doesn’t resemble your basic classroom or seminar room. The odd part is: they are all women. It’s downright spooky.
Actually, on second look, more than one very odd thing. There are no desks. No laptops. No books. They’re just sitting in a big circle, having a good laugh. Inside the circle there’s a weird Magical table of some sort with totems on it. I guess it’s an interconnectedness seminar.
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Controversial efforts
CBS News fired veteran “60 Minutes” correspondent Scott Pelley on Tuesday, one day after he sharply criticized the newsmagazine’s new leadership in front of the staff.
CBS said Pelley was terminated for cause, and industry analysts immediately predicted that Pelley might take legal action against the network.
Here’s hoping.
The firing is sure to trigger even more scrutiny of CBS News editor in chief Bari Weiss and her controversial efforts to overhaul the network news division.
Controversial in part because she is such a random choice for CBS News editor in chief.
The letter referenced Pelley’s decision to pointedly question and criticize Bilton in a staff-wide meeting on Monday morning. Pelley’s scathing remarks immediately leaked to outside news outlets and ignited a crisis inside CBS.
In the meeting, Pelley pressed Bilton to explain last Thursday’s firings of top producers and two correspondents at the storied newsmagazine. Bilton, who was appointed on the same day, tried to reassure staff that he respected the program’s legacy while arguing that changes were necessary.
And a random tech journalist is exactly the right person to make those changes!
Pelley also accused Weiss, who was not in attendance, of “murdering” “60 Minutes.” When Bilton said Weiss loves the show, Pelley responded, “She does not love this place. She was brought in to kill it, and she’s been doing exactly that.”
Pelley’s charge had political overtones. President Donald Trump sued CBS in 2024 over a “60 Minutes” interview with Kamala Harris, and even though legal experts said the suit was frivolous, Paramount’s previous ownership team decided to settle the case in July 2025 rather than defend the program in court.
Furthermore, Paramount’s new ownership team has sought a close relationship with Trump and his administration, and some critics of CBS have asserted a link between corporate attempts to appease Trump and the current overhaul of “60 Minutes.”
Gosh, ya think??
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It ain’t broke so we’ll break it
The Bari Weiss 60 Minutes continues to scorch the earth it stands on.
CBS News fired Scott Pelley on Tuesday, jettisoning one of the network’s best-known journalists in a clash over the future of “60 Minutes,” the country’s top-rated news program.
Mr. Pelley, 68, a “60 Minutes” correspondent and a former anchor of “CBS Evening News,” joined the network in 1989. At a staff meeting on Monday, he accused the network’s editor in chief, Bari Weiss, of “murdering ‘60 Minutes,’” citing the ouster last week of the program’s leadership team and two on-air correspondents.
“We have parted ways with Scott Pelley,” Nick Bilton, the tech journalist who was hired last week as the new “60 Minutes” executive producer, wrote in a memo to the show’s staff on Tuesday night.
Why the flaming hell hire a tech journalist to run 60 Minutes?
To ruin it, that’s why.
The firing of Mr. Pelley is among the most consequential moves of Ms. Weiss’s rocky tenure at CBS. And it is almost certain to spike tensions that have coursed through the network for months.
It also raises the stakes of Ms. Weiss’s surprising decision to replace the entire leadership team at “60 Minutes,” CBS News’s most successful franchise, and hire Mr. Bilton, who has no experience in broadcast TV, to oversee the show. The program’s viewership was up 9 percent this past season from a year prior, and the show is routinely among the nation’s highest-rated weekly broadcasts, according to Nielsen.
It ain’t broke, so Bari Weiss is fixing it, i.e. tying it to a cannonball and throwing it overboard.
At the staff meeting on Monday, which Ms. Weiss did not attend, Mr. Pelley repeatedly pressed Mr. Bilton about the network’s decision to fire Tanya Simon, the show’s previous executive producer. He also told Mr. Bilton that he had “slender” qualifications to oversee the show and that he would “never be welcome” at “60 Minutes.”
In his letter to Mr. Pelley on Tuesday, Mr. Bilton expressed his deep frustration with those remarks.
“You hijacked my first meeting with staff to disparage me, my qualifications, and my intentions with remarkable incivility and contempt,” Mr. Bilton wrote. He called it a “performative display of hostility” that “demonstrated that you have no interest in contributing to the future success of the show.”
Me me me, my my my – but what was he doing there in the first place? Why hire a tech journalist to run a muckraking show like 60 Minutes? To kill it, that’s why.
Ms. Weiss was appointed last year by CBS’s owner, the tech scion David Ellison, with a mandate to revamp the news division for the digital era. An opinion journalist with little experience in broadcast television, Ms. Weiss was also a longtime critic of the legacy media
Tech tech tech, digital digital digital – all presentation, no substance. If it ain’t broke, don’t revamp it.
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Addendum
The Department of Justice has permanently abandoned plans for a $1.8 billion anti-weaponization compensation fund created to settle a lawsuit by President Donald Trump against the Internal Revenue Service, acting Attorney General Todd Blanche testified to a House panel on Tuesday.
But Trump, his family members and related business entities remain protected from tax audits and enforcement actions in connection with tax returns filed before last month’s out-of-court settlement of his lawsuit, Blanche told the House Appropriations Subcommittee on Commerce, Justice, Science, and Related Agencies.
So he can cheat with impunity. What a splendid system we have here.
Blanche, who previously served as Trump’s criminal defense attorney, personally signed off on the DOJ’s May 19 addendum to the settlement of the lawsuit that gave Trump and his family that protection, a day after the deal was announced.
The addendum also bars the DOJ from prosecuting Trump and the others for cases that would be based on “Lawfare and/or Weaponization,” without defining what those terms mean or what alleged conduct by the targets could entail.
Never you mind what those terms mean. Trump will let you know what they mean when he takes advantage of them.
“We are not moving forward with the fund, period,” Blanche told Rep. Grace Meng, D-N.Y., the ranking member of the subcommittee. But he later refused to put that promise in writing despite telling Meng that the DOJ would never relaunch the fund.
Therefore there is no need to put the promise in writing.
Critics of the fund said that the DOJ’s statement did not make clear whether the department had dropped any plans for the fund.
Those critics, who include Republican senators, opposed the fund because of the lack of legislative oversight over the fund, and concerns that it would pay people convicted of attacking police officers during the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol by a mob of Trump supporters.
Well yes, those are concerns. Look at the pretty butterfly.
Rep. Rosa DeLauro, D-Conn., fumed at Blanche after he told her he would not rescind the addendum that granted Trump and his relatives protection from regulatory or legal enforcement actions related to their past returns.
“Simply put, you just gave the president’s family a tax immunity to the tune of about $100 million,” DeLauro said, referring to the amount that The New York Times last month estimated could be the tax liability that Trump would have faced under a previously pending IRS audit.
Blanche replied: “Not true.”
DeLauro continued, “Well, yes, you have, my friend,” over his objections.
“You know, look, and I just want to say this: the Save America PAC [political action committee controlled by Trump] paid you nearly $10 million between March of 2024 and December of 2024 to serve as President Trump’s personal defense attorney,” she said.
Well by golly they got their money’s worth!
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Fit for whose purpose?
LibDems to women: you don’t matter.
Civil war has broken out among the Liberal Democrats after Sir Ed Davey pledged to oppose official guidance protecting female-only spaces.
Female people must not be allowed to have their own spaces. It’s a violation of the sacred rights of men to permit such a thing. Men are bosses, women are employees or slaves; women have no rights which the male person is bound to respect.
Earlier this month, Bridget Phillipson finally published the long-awaited advice from the Equalities and Human Rights Commission (EHRC). It tells businesses and public bodies to bar trans women – biological men – from women’s toilets and changing facilities.
The Liberal Democrat leader has written to Ms Phillipson to demand she withdraw the guidance, saying it was not “fit for purpose”.
He said the guidance was not clear enough, did not protect trans people from discrimination and harassment, and was not “compatible with long-standing British values”.
What he means is that it doesn’t protect men from being told to get out of the women’s toilet. Well guess what, bro: men shouldn’t be in the women’s toilet in the first place. I bet you used to know that.
The statement drew stinging criticism from Dr Zoe Hollowood, chair of Liberal Voice for Women, a women’s rights campaign group within the Lib Dems.
She accused him of ignoring the views of women and prioritising the views of trans people.
“Polling consistently shows that Lib Dem voters and members believe single-sex spaces should be protected based on biological sex,” she said. “Ignoring this reality is a betrayal to women everywhere, including in our own party.”
It’s very embittering, this studied indifference to women.
Sir Ed’s letter to Ms Phillipson was written with Marie Goldman, the Lib Dem equalities spokesman.
They wrote: “We do not believe that the new code of practice is fit for purpose. It does not provide clear and workable guidance, and it does not do enough to protect everyone from discrimination, harassment and victimisation.”
It’s not victimization to tell men they can’t invade women’s spaces. It’s victimization to let men invade women’s spaces.
Dr Hollowood said: “Liberal Voice for Women is profoundly disappointed by Ed Davey and Marie Goldman’s recent letter to Bridget Phillipson.
“By focusing on trans inclusion, the Lib Dem leadership has actively chosen to ignore the vast majority of women who rely on single-sex spaces when they are vulnerable and undressing.”
That’s the thing. They can’t do this “let trans women use women’s spaces” thing without ignoring the vast majority of women who rely on single-sex spaces when they are vulnerable and undressing. The two are welded together. Davey and Goldman can’t be unaware of this, so they’re doing it on purpose.
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No known background
Trump named Federal Housing Finance Agency Director Bill Pulte as acting director of national intelligence on Tuesday, a surprise move that would elevate a political ally with no known background in intelligence to a key national spy post.
Well Trump has no known background in government and that didn’t stop him, so onward with Amateur Hour!
Pulte made headlines last year for recommending the Department of Justice investigate Democratic lawmakers, Federal Reserve board member Lisa Cook and New York Attorney General Letitia James over unproven allegations of mortgage fraud. None of the allegations have led to a conviction.
Pffff who cares. Accusations are fun!
In a statement, White House spokesperson Davis Ingle defended the pick: “The President chooses the best and most talented people to serve in his Cabinet. That is why this Administration has achieved record successes for the American people. Bill Pulte is a great selection and he will do a great job on behalf of the American people,” he wrote.
Hahahahahaha yeah that’s a good one.
“This appointment speaks volumes about what this president expects from the nation’s top intelligence official,” said Sen. Mark Warner (D-Va.), the top Democrat on the Senate Intelligence Committee. “Rather than selecting a respected national security professional capable of delivering independent judgments, the president has chosen an official who has demonstrated not just willingness but eagerness to use the authorities of government to pursue political retribution.”
Boys just wanna have fun.
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Ok for them but not for us
Disability Rights UK defends purported trans rights at the expense of genuine women’s rights.
Disability Rights UK expresses our solidarity with trans & intersex people and the wider LGBTQ+ community following the release of The Equalities and Human Rights Commission (EHRC)’s Code of Practice, which sets a dangerous precedent for the weakening of protected characteristics and risks further ostracisation of trans & intersex people from public life.
What about the weakening of the protected characteristic of being female? What about the ostracism of women from public life? Don’t female people count? If not why not?
Disability Rights UK issues our unequivocal solidarity with trans people, who should not be forced to choose between risking harassment in public facilities – or not using them at all.
But no solidarity with female people, who should be forced to choose between risking harassment in public facilities – or not using them at all?
Why? Why is it ok to take away women’s rights for the sake of men who pretend to be women?
I don’t expect an answer any time soon.
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There will be no Donaldtown
Trump’s attempt to throw the best anniversary party is flopping on the beach at low tide.
…the president was complaining that seven of the nine acts scheduled to headline the July 4 weekend musical program canceled within 48 hours of one another because they realized that the event was degenerating into a hyperpartisan salute to Trump personally. His proposed solution? Replace the canceled acts with a Trump rally speech! A speech that will focus on Trump’s outrage that a judge blocked him from renaming the Kennedy Center after himself!
On July 4, 1776, Congress declared not only the severance of the political tie between 13 British colonies and their former homeland but also the end of monarchical government in the United States. For 150 years before 1776, the American colonies were ruled by a sequence of queens and kings. The names of those monarchs were inscribed on the American map: Virginia, Jamestown, Charleston, Annapolis, Georgia, and in innumerable King Streets and Queen Streets. Then, on one parchment, the new nation repudiated its political origin, and declared that “all men are created equal.” Whatever those words meant, however much slaveholder hypocrisy attended them, they promised a republican future for the people of the land.
The man who assumed responsibility for organizing the 250th commemoration of those words instead decided to make the day a royalist celebration of himself: seeking to emblazon his face on coinage and currency, displaying his image on banners in downtown Washington, and scheduling the central event of the celebration—a televised cage fight—for his own birthday on June 14.
Well it’s asking a lot to expect Trump to know the difference between royalism and republicanism. He would have to know what the words meant, just for a start.
Trump’s effort to rebrand the semiquincentennial as the Day of Trump left no time, budget, or effort available for the true purpose of the anniversary. As his own self-celebration has fizzled, a void has opened between the scheduled roster of events and the true purpose and meaning of the solemnity of July 4, 2026. This powerful date will go unmarked by any act of memory worthy of the nation. The Reflecting Pool will be repainted too blue by an overpaid no-bid contractor. The statues on the Memorial Bridge will be gilded too brightly by another overpaid no-bid contractor. There’s a project to erect an Albert Speer–style triumphal arch overlooking the Potomac.
It’s bread and circuses but without the bread.
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Slender qualifications
CBS News faced a fresh wave of turmoil on Monday after Scott Pelley, the “60 Minutes” correspondent, laced into the show’s newly hired executive producer during a staff meeting and accused Bari Weiss, the network’s editor in chief, of “murdering” the longstanding Sunday news program.
In an extraordinary exchange, Mr. Pelley, his newscaster’s baritone sometimes shaking in anger, told Nick Bilton, the new executive producer, that he had “slender” qualifications for his new job and questioned the network’s commitment to the future of the program, according to a recording of the meeting obtained by The New York Times.
The 10 a.m. gathering, held at the program’s Midtown Manhattan headquarters, was intended as a formal introduction to Mr. Bilton, a tech journalist and filmmaker who was appointed last week as part of a major shake-up at “60 Minutes.” CBS fired Tanya Simon, the previous executive producer, and her deputy, along with Sharyn Alfonsi and Cecilia Vega, two of the show’s correspondents — an event that Mr. Pelley referred to as “Black Thursday.”
Yeh but it’s a shakeup. It’s always good to have a shakeup. Even if it shakes things up from good to bad, it’s good to have it, because of the shaking part. Without shaking everybody gets stale. A nice big pie in the face works wonders.
The meeting quickly turned tense — not a surprise after months of strain between veteran journalists at “60 Minutes” and Ms. Weiss, an opinion journalist who was a longtime critic of legacy media institutions before she became the head of one last year. She was appointed by David Ellison, a tech scion who took control of CBS’s parent company, Paramount, in a multibillion-dollar merger.
An opinion journalist with no apparent experience or skills that would qualify her to be the executive producer of 60 Minutes.
Mr. Bilton, who had never worked in traditional broadcast news, opened Monday’s meeting by trying to assuage the anxieties of staff members who believed he might fundamentally change the decades-old DNA of the country’s top-rated news program.
See that’s the thing right there. The top-rated part. See for reference: If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it. Why mess with 60 Minutes when it’s top-rated? I can see suggesting ideas for subjects to cover, but bouncing in and blowing everything up is another story.
[Bilton] also warned that the broadcast television industry that incubated “60 Minutes” would soon be obsolete. “Broadcast is an ice cube that is melting, OK?” Mr. Bilton said, saying the show had to adapt. “Bari loves this institution,” he added. “She loves ’60 Minutes.’”
At that, Mr. Pelley interrupted.
“She is murdering ‘60 Minutes,’” the correspondent said. “She does not love this place. She was brought in to kill it, and she’s been doing exactly that.”
Mr. Pelley added: “She has no qualifications for her job; you have slender qualifications for this job. The changes that she’s made at the ‘Evening News’ have been catastrophic, so why should we expect that any of this is going to be any better?”
Mr. Bilton responded: “Well, I will show you. That’s what I have to say. That is my plan over the next two weeks. I’ll be meeting with everyone. I’m very excited to meet with everyone, yourself included.”
Yeah, it’s so exciting watching vandals destroy what has been a pretty valuable resource.
Ms. Weiss’s handling of “60 Minutes” has generated internal turmoil for months.
In December, she pulled a segment reported by Ms. Alfonsi, about the brutal treatment of migrants in a Salvadoran prison, saying that it needed more reporting. The segment was critical of the Trump administration, and Ms. Alfonsi said the decision was “political.” The piece ultimately aired with some additional comments from the Trump administration.
Well that’s great because the Trump administration is such a poor struggling isolated little group being bullied by those mean journalists from the tv.
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Persuasion
Helen Webberley asks, with characteristic venom, “What do you mean ‘dignity for trans people’?”
“How ever,” she goes on, “do you think it might be dignified for a trans woman to be placed on a male ward?”
Stop right there.
How do you, struck-off former doctor Helen Webberley, think it might be dignified for women to have a man on their ward? How do you, Helen Webberley, think it might be dignified for women to be forced to share all their spaces and organizations and prizes and competitions with men? How do you, Helen Webberley, think it might be dignified for women to have nothing of their own any more, because they are required to share everything with men?
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Only a few
Trump has said musical performances celebrating the country’s 250th birthday should be called off after several artists dropped out, citing the event’s affiliation with the White House.
“Cancel it,” he said in a post on Truth Social, calling the slated performers “overpriced” and “boring”.
Well if they’re overpriced and boring, Mister Sir, why did you invite them?
As of Sunday, only a few musical acts were still scheduled to perform out of nine featured artists originally announced on Wednesday. Martina McBride, The Commodores, Young MC and Bret Michaels dropped out.
Vanilla Ice and Milli Vanilli are still on for 26 June, as is Flo Rida on 2 July. Trump said he is now considering replacing the event with a “Make America Great Again rally”.
Ya that’s a good idea. One, it’s so novel and original. Two, it will absolutely make everyone forget about all those people who backed out. Great face-save!
Trump said in a post on Truth Social that he had heard artists were getting “the yips” – a term used in golf for involuntary spasms or freezes that [affect] a swing. He said he was thinking of appearing himself at the same time and location.
“I am ordering my Representatives to look at the feasibility of doing an AMERICA IS BACK Rally on Wednesday, Washington, DC, same time, same location. Only Great Patriots invited,” he wrote, calling himself the “Number One Attraction anywhere in the World” and saying he “gets much larger audiences than Elvis in his prime”.
It’s a grand old tradition for US presidents to compare their audiences to those of Elvis. It’s not called the Elvismeter for nothing.
He later doubled down, saying he wanted to replace the planned fair altogether with a rally.
“We should have a giant MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN RALLY, for 250, instead of having overpriced singers, who nobody wants to hear, whose music is boring, and yet who do nothing but complain,” he said.
No wait, wait – let’s quadruple down. Make it a rocket launch to Mars. No overpriced singers there! Nobody who does nothing but complain there!
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Specify the values
Lib Dems shout that women don’t matter.
Civil war has broken out among the Liberal Democrats after Sir Ed Davey pledged to oppose official guidance protecting female-only spaces.
Earlier this month, Bridget Phillipson finally published the long-awaited advice from the Equalities and Human Rights Commission (EHRC). It tells businesses and public bodies to bar trans women – biological men – from women’s toilets and changing facilities.
The Liberal Democrat leader has written to Ms Phillipson to demand she withdraw the guidance, saying it was not “fit for purpose”. He said the guidance was not clear enough, did not protect trans people from discrimination and harassment, and was not “compatible with long-standing British values”.
So, protecting women from discrimination and harassment is not necessary, but protecting men who pretend to be women is necessary. Why is that exactly?
Also what are the “long-standing British values” that require pampering and soothing of men who say they are women while not requiring any such anxious concern for women?
Sir Ed’s statement drew stinging criticism from Dr Zoe Hollowood, chairman of the women’s rights campaign group within the Lib Dems.
She accused him of ignoring the views of women and prioritising the views of trans people.
“Polling consistently shows that Lib Dem voters and members believe single-sex spaces should be protected based on biological sex,” she said. “Ignoring this reality is a betrayal to women everywhere, including in our own party.”
But men like Ed Davies seem to be quite happy to betray women everywhere.
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Understandable impatience
Jenny Lindsay in The Scotsman on Nicola Sturgeon:
Nicola Sturgeon, former First Minister and SNP leader, presided over the worst period of profound misogyny in Scotland in my lifetime. Women’s right to any spaces and services of their own, won historically on the basis of sex, came within a whisker of being obliterated, with her full, ongoing, ‘I will never apologise’ approval.
Any woman opposing this erasure – the end result of her ‘self-ID’ policy push, where even male double-rapists must be viewed as women if they want to be – were punished and hounded, including women inside her own party.
It has therefore provoked understandable impatience that Sturgeon and her acolytes have spent much of the last week crying ‘sexism’ and ‘misogyny’ as she faces questions over her estranged husband, Peter Murrell’s, admission of appropriating SNP party funds when Chief Executive.
She really ticks all the boxes, doesn’t she.
Sturgeon’s handling of Murrell’s guilty plea last week on the charge of embezzling £400,000 of party funds has been graceless. It’s also surprising, given she must have known such a plea was forthcoming.
Instead of clearing the diary, preparing a statement to the effect she was taking time to deal with the – perfectly understandable – feelings of betrayal as a spouse, she has gone on defensive mode very publicly.
Speaking at the Hay-On-Wye literary festival, Sturgeon raged she was being ‘held responsible’ for the actions of her husband. ‘It is the age-old cry of when a man does something wrong, well, the woman must have known about it, somehow it’s her fault,’ she snapped, when questioned.
Well, think of it this way. His doings hint at a certain kind of character. She was married to him. You do the math.
This is crass. It’s neither ‘sexist’ nor ‘misogynist’, as Sturgeon supporters have wailed this week, to question the incuriosity about luxury items turning up in her own home. Her justifications she was busy, wasn’t home much, she and Murrell had large enough salaries to justify £2k designer salt and pepper pots and various £500 Montblanc fountain pens are, in fairness, plausible. They’re beside the point, though.
Now you know where the luxury fountain pens question came from.
She presided over a regime where questioning her led to bullying and many subsequent resignations, while she and ambitious, younger colleagues pushed the maddest, misogynist ideology – gender identity – while turning a blind eye to excessive abuse of women, including party colleagues.
Her attempts to claim she’s judged by different standards from men is an absurdity; a cynical attempt at dodging responsibility from a highly-skilled mistress of spin.
A highly-skilled mistress of spin who threw women overboard.
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Next up: luxury toilet paper
I just saw a reference in a news article to “luxury fountain pens” so I felt the need to find out what a luxury fountain pen could possibly be. I mean, what is a fountain pen? A thing you write with. It holds some ink, and you write with it, and every now and then you get to refill it with ink. Where does “luxury” come into it? It’s not silk or mink or soft leather or any other bit of an endangered animal, it’s just a small tool for writing. Where does luxury find an entry?
I learned there’s a pen that sells for $1,270.
People are weird.
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He accepts the difference
So the ground is beginning to shift?
The Health Secretary has backtracked on his previous claim that trans women are women.
James Murray, who replaced Wes Streeting last month, previously said he defined women as “adult female and trans women”.
However, he has now claimed to have “changed what I would say” and that he accepts the difference between sex and gender.
So what is gender then? Is a skirt one gender while jeans are another? Short hair one gender and long hair the other? Crying one gender, shouting the other?
On Monday, Mr Murray was told by BBC Radio 4’s Today programme that Mr Streeting had changed his mind on trans rights.
Asked whether he had shifted his own position, Mr Murray responded: “Yeah, I have changed what I would say. I wouldn’t say that phrase any more. And I think that over the last few years a lot of us, myself included, have thought about this question in some detail.
Oh yes? Why didn’t you do it sooner?
But also – really? What kind of “detail”? What detail does it take to decide that oh right, it all becomes clear now, men are not women after all? Please do spell out the “detail” part. Please also explain why you didn’t think about it in some detail from the outset.
“I believe that single-sex spaces should be protected on the basis of sex, on the basis of biological sex, whilst at the same time believing in dignity for trans people – recognising that sex and gender are different things, but being absolutely clear that single-sex spaces within the NHS, for instance, need to be protected on the basis of sex.”
The thing about that is that being a trans person is itself a move away from “dignity”. There is no dignity in claiming to be the sex you’re not.
Saying you’re uncomfortable or miserable or furious with the rules about how women and men are supposed to look and behave is entirely compatible with dignity, but pretending to be the one you’re not is not.
Mr Murray once said that it was very important to debate trans rights in an interview in which he defended a transgender swimmer competing against female athletes.
Funny what a hard time they have perceiving the obvious.
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18 new letters
U.S. District Judge Christopher Cooper wrote in his opinion that the 1964 statute that led to the creation of the Kennedy Center makes “crystal clear” that the center is to be named for President John F. Kennedy only. “Congress gave the Kennedy Center its name, and only Congress can change it,” the judge wrote.
In December of last year, the center’s board voted to change its name to the “Trump Kennedy Center.” Soon after the vote, 18 new letters were added to the building’s facade in front of Kennedy’s name to read: “The Donald J. Trump and the John F. Kennedy Memorial Center for the Performing Arts.” The change was also reflected and on the website and promotional materials for events. When White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt announced the change on social media, she said it was “because of the unbelievable work President Trump has done over the last year in saving the building.”
No no no no no. That’s not how that works. It doesn’t work that way. It doesn’t ever work that way. The Golden Gate Bridge is always being painted (because corrosion is always happening in one spot or another) but its name is still The Golden Gate Bridge. Notre Dame de Paris got a complete makeover after the fire, but its name did not switch to Notre Dame Édouard Phillippe.
That’s all the more true when the original name is the name in order to commemorate a particular person. Note that even Trump hasn’t (as far as I know) tried to rename the Lincoln Memorial the Lincoln and Trump Memorial, despite having told people to sweep up the cigarette butts in a more timely fashion.
There’s also of course the fact that both Lincoln and Kennedy were murdered on the job, and that’s why the Memorial and the Center exist. Trump has not been murdered on the job, so he doesn’t get a Memorial and he doesn’t get to glue himself to an existing memorial building.
Enough already.
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Guest post: It’s a Japanese anime thing
Originally a comment by Artymorty on Knock-knees.
Ah, yes, uchimata.
Pigeon toes. It’s a Japanese anime thing. Along with eyes-closed giggling with a hand covering the mouth, or showing gushing excitement by squeezing one’s elbows against the waist while waving her raised fists back and forth, or sitting on the ground, knees pointed forward and inward, legs bent out to the sides, forming a “w” shape when seen from above. It’s vaguely arguable that some of this aesthetic has roots in geisha and kabuki and old Japanese kimono culture, but these days, characters in such poses almost always come dressed in a short-skirted schoolgirl or French maid costume. It’s one of the defining aesthetics of Japanese anime, and it’s deliberately pornographic — far from traditional, ceremonial, or austere.
The “moe” look has been slowly emerging since at least the ’60s (the “cute witch fantasy girlfriend” trope, imported to Japan via American TV — I Dream of Jeannie and Bewitched — was an early prototype), but it was formalized into animation style guides around the ’90s. These animators were adult men, and although the comics and cartoons they produced were ostensibly aimed at teen girls, they were often actually consumed by other adult men.
Then fashion magazines aimed at girls took it up. Real life (as opposed to drawn) teen girls in glossy photo shoots were instructed to do those poses. Soon after, pigeon-toed walking became a social contagion which has caused a medical epidemic among Japanese girls and women: they came to believe they’re supposed to walk with pigeon toes in order to be seen as desirable by men. But it causes severe and painful bone and muscle deformities.
The Sailor Moon series is probably the most canonical example of this subgenre of anime: from the 1990s, it was a cartoon about teen girls with superpowers, but it was drenched in sexualized poses and even full-frontal nudity in the original Japanese airings. It was clearly made with horny men in mind just as much as teen girls. And just as the West exported the submissive magical girlfriend to Japan via Jeannie — who called her boyfriend “Master”, you’ll recall — the Japanese kinked and sexed it up a hundredfold and exported it back to us via anime — which has become a cultural juggernaut among Western young men.
That mix, female-character driven stories told through the male gaze is ground zero for the recent trans explosion: a girl or woman is what a horny man imagines a girl or woman to be, rather than a human female. It’s no wonder trans and anime are virtually synonymous online.
And there it is in that male athlete. From the pigeon toes alone, an entire decades- and continents-spanning history unfolds before our eyes…
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Knock-knees
Look at his feet.
In case you don’t feel like clicking on the image –
Aww idn’t that precious, that sweet little girl with her shy pigeon-toed feets at the end of her teeny-tiny little legs.
For the avoidance of doubt, since even Fox can’t be bothered to say it: pigeon-toes is a male.
Notice also that even Fox won’t tell the truth. “Trans athlete” is meaningless. He’s a male athlete, competing against female athletes; in short he’s a cheat.
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Posty McPosterson
Trump has been working hard today.
In a spree of posts made to his Truth Social account on Saturday, Donald Trump lauded his administration’s efforts to turn the National Mall’s reflecting pool blue, denounced a judge’s ruling removing his name from the Kennedy Center, and announced he will hold an “America Is Back” rally on Wednesday to replace a concert series after a number of performers backed out.
After arriving at the Trump National Golf Club in Sterling, Virginia, at 11.08am, Trump posted to his social media platform 25 times in the next two hours. The president’s posts included a series of apparently AI-generated images, including one of him playing for the New York Knicks and dunking over New York’s governor, Kathy Hochul; another of him riding a horse alongside George Washington and a Trump-branded race car tearing up the White House lawn; and one depicting the “Obama presidential library” as a huge garbage can holding a giant trash bag.
A totally normal Saturday for a totally normal president.